In 2010, Wikileaks rocked the diplomatic community. Thousands of secret cables were suddenly available to all. And while some revelations were shrugged off as pure gossip, others shed light on the kinds of relationships the United States was cultivating abroad—and the U.S. government’s sometimes hypocritical views of foreign leaders. Since the Cold War, Washington has been using various means to keep tabs on, manipulate, and outmaneuver governments around the world.
This bit was hardly news. The effect of Wikileaks was not so much to make these facts public, but to make them embarrassing. For instance, the Tunisians’ open secret was a corrupt and excessive regime. But it was their open secret. Egypt’s sham democracy was spoken about among its citizens, but not written about in the press. And Libya’s Qaddafi family had hands in every pie, but for it to be made public that Libyans did nothing about this? Well, that was a step too far.
Public knowledge and transparency aren’t the same thing, in other words. And democratic revolutions—even the failed ones of the Arab Spring , which some have linked to the Wikileaks disclosures—call for transparency. As democratic revolutions have occurred time and again in states around the world, both external observers and the participants themselves have framed democracy as the form of government that is the antithesis of state secrecy.
But what if democracies actually require secrecy?
This is the provocative question posed by historian Katlyn Marie Carter’s thought-provoking new book, Democracy in Darkness. Circulating back and forth across the Atlantic, Carter’s book looks at the evolution of different ways of thinking about the relationship between secrecy and democracy in the origins and the outcomes of the U.S. and French revolutions.
This book will be eye-opening for anyone with a passing interest in contemporary politics. The striking historical parallels to the debates that continue today extend to the richly detailed descriptions of changing positions taken by revolutionary factions—Girondins and Jacobins, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans—as they tried to position themselves as the spokesmen of the people.
Julian Assange positioned Wikileaks as a radical proponent of transparency. But this has led to questions about whether states are, in Carter’s terms, reflective or insulated in their approach to representation. Do they reflect the direct will of their citizens, in which case the people need access to all relevant information in order to direct their representatives? Or do they make decisions with an eye on what is best for the citizens of the nation, which might require a degree of secrecy?
Take, for example, the U.S. Constitutional Convention. As Carter explains, the heated deliberations in 1787 over the Constitution took place in secrecy—“behind the curtain”—in order for the ultimate product to be presented as a consensus, albeit a consensus known to have been worked out through debate and compromise. The representatives to the convention were supposed to act with the nation’s best interest at heart, and this could have required some decisions that would be unpopular in particular states. It wasn’t until 1819 that the deliberations were published.
George Washington, the first president of the United States, presides over the 1787 Constitutional Convention in this undated illustration. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Part of the rationale for the desire and need for secrecy was the reality that already, in 1787, the United States had adopted its trademark ability to make every position into a political statement. Those who supported the secrecy of the deliberations argued “that it was useful and even necessary to avoid proceedings compromised by external, factional pressure.” In other words, some delegates were already worried about the need to perform political values for their constituents rather than making decisions for the whole nation.
If those pressures sound familiar in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, they are certainly not new. The rise of citizen journalism—as opposed to official government gazettes—aided the calls for public accountability based on transparency. The 18th-century French version of C-SPAN, Le Logographe, reprinted assembly debates word-for-word, without commentary.
Carter’s attention to the press as an interested party, motivated as much by sales of papers and editors’ politics as a desire to hold government accountable, is an impressive feature of the book. Carter doesn’t merely use the press as a source for public feeling, but also interrogates its owners’ and editors’ choices, and the ways that representatives acted and made decisions based on the interventions of the press.
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In 1789, for example, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville founded his own newspaper as much to break into the publishing industry and get a foot in the door of politics as to publicize the workings of government and to make sure that “people can judge whether their representatives are fulfilling their intentions.”
In France, initial revolutionary excitement about transparent government gave way to concerns about the practicalities of governance. The size of the representative body—18 times the size of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time—and the large numbers of onlookers led to debates about the creation of smaller, more private, committees of 20 to 30 deputies who could deal with particular issues before presenting them to the whole assembly.
When the king fled in the summer of 1791, the crisis of both secrecy and representation was exposed. Louis XVI claimed that he represented France, while the National Assembly merely represented different interest groups, mired by infighting and popularity contests. But his flight spurred the National Assembly to shut its proceedings to the public.
Wanting privacy to coordinate a united response to the king, the National Assembly opened itself up to accusations of conspiracy. It lost control over the narrative. The seeds were sown for a clash.
Smoke rises from a fire left burning after clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Tunis on Jan. 14, 2011, after then-Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s address to the nation.Fethi Belaid/AFP via Getty Images
The ability to control information, unsurprisingly, is a common feature of governance. Wikileaks revealed that the new frontier for transparency was the internet. After Tunisian protests broke out in the winter 2010-11, Egypt, Libya, and Syria all shut down the internet for their citizens. For heads of state implicated by Wikileaks—whether they were subject to revolutions or not—the sudden publicity focused on their diplomatic relations raised questions about their ability or willingness to legitimately represent the interests of their people.
Relations with foreign states also tested George Washington’s ability to be fully transparent. After the American Revolution ended, there were new controversies surrounding Britain’s ongoing impressment of U.S. sailors into the British navy. Washington used his executive powers to appoint John Jay to go to London and negotiate a treaty.
But when Jay arrived back in Philadelphia eight months later, the text was kept secret, and the Senate debated and voted on it in secret. The treaty was leaked to the press by one of the senators by way of the French foreign envoy, and it immediately caused an outcry. A Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper complained that, while the president and Senate were empowered to make treaties, the Constitution “communicates no ability to hatch those things in darkness.”
And the public performance of transparency wasn’t the same thing as public accountability. Echoing the Wikileaks pattern, as the French Revolution tipped into the Reign of Terror, King Louis XVI was revealed in 1792 to have been attempting to undermine the constitutional government to which he had agreed. In a secret trove of documents found by the minister of the interior, the king’s opposition to the revolutionary changes was made public. Deputies to the National Assembly who also ran their own newspapers commented extensively on the documents.
But like Wikileaks, many of the revelations weren’t really what made the documents news. What did shock the French public, though, was the king’s attempt to shape public opinion by paying spies, holding secret meetings with deputies to the assembly, and planting supporters in the assembly and the press. Secrecy was being used to shape the will of the people. After Louis’s execution and the rise of Maximilien Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety met in secret specifically to avoid being witnessed and influenced by “the spies of foreign courts, aristocrats, and agents of foreign powers”
Edouard Manet’s undated illustration of the crowd and guillotine at the execution of French King Louis XVI in 1793.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images
The ramifications of this knowledge were deadly. Convinced that their representatives were working with the king or with foreign powers in secret, committees were raised to investigate “who was implicated.” The Terror that followed showed the danger that could bloom out of the fear of the betrayal—or perception of betrayal—of the public will.
This question of who represented the will of the people in France was also a dilemma facing George Washington’s administration. With a series of rapid changes of government in revolutionary France, who should the U.S. support, if it was to support its old ally? Which French government, claiming to represent the people’s will, was legitimate?
Ultimately, Washington chose neutrality, a decision formulated in secret and largely against the popular mood across the United States, because he believed it represented the national interest, even if it didn’t represent the will of the people. The response—a renewed call for vigilance amongst citizens and an open declaration of discontent with their government—fed into an emerging view of transparency being formulated by Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s position was that representatives should reflect their constituents rather than make decisions on their behalf. This feedback from constituents was only possible through publicity and transparency. Jefferson particularly argued for transparency in opposition to the Adams’s administration’s 1798 Sedition Act, which had prosecuted newspaper owners for printing “malicious” things about Congress and the president and was rumored to secretly be the result of British influence.
Jefferson saw an opening to make a case for a different view of politics—even if his interest in transparency was often for show. And although Washington had warned against the rise of party politics, the need to constantly renegotiate the relationship between secrecy and the demands of representation made party politics a useful tool for members of the public to make their voices heard. Continual debates about the nature of secrecy and representation, taking place in public, were themselves part of the democratic process worked out in the United States.
Ultimately, in France, the contradictions between the will of the people, the representation of the people, and the interests of the nation were seized on by Napoleon Bonaparte, who portrayed himself as the embodiment of the state. His authoritarianism was both a resolution to the pressures of always responding to the people and a response to the fear of perceived betrayal of the people.
Napoleon reflected popular sovereignty without democracy or transparency, but with plenty of publicity, using newspapers, paintings, and stunts such as dining in front of a public audience to craft “his image as superhuman and therefore trustworthy” while also having “an affinity for the common people.”
Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, holds up a copy of the Guardian newspaper during a press conference in London on July 26, 2010.Leon Neal/AFP via Getty Images
As the 2010s progressed and we learned more about Wikileaks, other questions about the relationship between secrecy and democracy became more pressing.
Why did so many leaks seem aimed at Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign? Who was actually funding Wikileaks? Why was a member of the Wikileaks-affiliated political party in Australia meeting with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad? Why wasn’t Wikileaks itself more transparent about its choices? Whose interest was the organization representing?
In his dealings with the British and French, Washington’s reluctance to release diplomatic correspondence raised the question of representation at an international level, rather than a domestic one. And the question remains: What function does democracy have at an international level? For instance, are representatives to the United Nations reflective or insulated? In whose national interest do leaders make trade policies? And what about secrecy in those arenas?
As Carter argues, “in the realm of diplomacy especially, the Washington administration and its congressional allies strategically employed secrecy to pursue policies that were often not popular” but were deemed to be in the “best interest of the people.” But in making decisions at a global level—about climate change, nuclear policy, or economic development—what about the people who go unrepresented, either because they do not live in democracies, or because their governments aren’t invited to the table?
The questions raised by Carter throughout the book challenge an idea that democracy and transparency are the same thing, a dilemma faced equally by the new governments that emerged after the Arab Spring. Wikileaks seemed to suggest for a time that transparency in international relations had the effect of democratizing it, giving people everywhere equal access to information, with which to hold their governments—and the U.S. government—accountable.
In the years since 2010, it has become clear that transparency is not the same thing as representation. As Carter’s history shows with wonderful nuance, democratic governance is about a process of ongoing negotiation, not merely being in the know.
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